Earth Songs

Meredith Monk’s opera “ATLAS” caps an extraordinary season at the L.A. Phil.

- Alex Ross

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s centennial season, which recently ended with incandescent performances of Meredith Monk’s opera “atlas,” has no peer in modern orchestral history. More than fifty new scores shared space with classics of the repertory. Fully staged opera productions alternated with feats of avant-garde spectacle. The L.A. Phil, colossal in ambition and experimental in spirit, has redefined what an orchestra can be.

It was a season in which Andrew Norman added a new work to the canon, in the form of his shimmering soundscape “Sustain”; in which Benjamin Millepied devised exhilarating, cinematic choreography for Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”; in which the brilliant young director Yuval Sharon staged John Cage’s

“Europeras 1 and 2” at a Hollywood movie studio; in which an array of artists paid tribute to Yoko Ono; in which a tribute to the Fluxus movement entailed the making of a huge salad on the stage of Disney Hall; in which Esa- Pekka Salonen led one of the finest, most ferocious performances of “The Rite of Spring” I have heard; in which Thomas Wilkins conducted a no less electrifying account of Duke Ellington’s “Harlem”; and in which an indomitable band of opera singers and musicians repeated the “Contessa, perdono” ensemble, from “The Marriage of Figaro,” for twelve unbroken hours, in a rendition of Ragnar Kjartansson’s performance-art piece “Bliss.”